I. The Truth of Force

The questions that The Ring and Book (1868–69) raises regarding truth, perception, and testimony have long concerned critics. However, few critics have given particular focus to the role that memory plays in the poem.Footnote ¹ While The Ring and the Book was not the first piece of literature to offer different narrations of the same event, Robert Browning's introduction of at least ten iterations or perspectives (depending on how you count) of the same narrative within one work remains unique. The legal system is very much in view throughout the text of the poem, and so the nature of testimony as a component of the legal process is integral to our consideration of The Ring and the Book. Specifically, shifting attitudes about legal testimony in the nineteenth century make memory particularly important for any study of testimony in the poem. In his multivolume work The Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), Jeremy Bentham gives special consideration to the composition of testimony, which he argues consists of four elements: perception, judgment, memory, and expression (155). Bentham's work recognized that testimony was not a simple matter of truth and falsehood, but that the faculties of the witness were intimately intertwined with testimony. However, contemporary critics have tended to focus on perception and expression (language), while memory has remained mostly unexamined.

Yet, memory is central to The Ring and the Book, and its centrality is not limited to those monologues delivered by characters directly involved in the case. Indeed, Browning begins the poem with testimonies from those who have no firsthand knowledge of the events in question. Browning immediately opens up the concept of testimony to embrace more than courtroom utterances; the conversations in Books 2–4 between Romans demonstrate that spectators of the case also perceive, judge, and express varying interpretations based on the same body of evidence. Memory enters into these monologues in the way that such interpretations become part of the community narrative; the communal memory of the event is circulated and reified by the process of testimony that Browning introduces. This process becomes even more complex as the voices of those directly involved in the case are added to the mix. In her recent assessment of The Ring and the Book's critical history, Laura Struve argues that earlier, epistemological readings of the poem tend to center on questions of how to “[piece] together [the truth] from various sources. . . . [T]ruth becomes one story derived from many accounts” (425–26). But Struve and other critics like Stephen Jeffcoate have departed from this approach and sought instead to focus on the poem's fictionality as a key component to understanding its historical, legal, and epistemological implications. As E. Warwick Slinn argues, neither approach fully appreciates the poem's complexity, since “[a] conclusive telos . . . is neither within nor outside the text; it is simply not available” (115). Focusing solely on historicity or fictionality leads to a kind of myopia that glosses over the poem's conflicted pursuit of truth as a work of fiction. By introducing memory as a primary term and concept through which to understand The Ring and the Book I hope to demonstrate that the Browning's formulation of “truth” in the poem is inexorably interwoven with how and what the characters remember, irrespective of whether or not that memory is historically accurate. While truth may be presented as a process in the poem, as Slinn, Patricia Rigg, and Suzanne Bailey have argued, I suggest that it is primarily a process of memory, in which truth becomes a holistic concept that encompasses all the variance and contradiction that are inherent in multiple memories.

Of course, while the legal system is prominently in view throughout much of the poem, Browning also makes it quite clear that the legal system alone cannot arrive at the kind of truth he envisions for the poem. His representation of the lawyers in Books 8 and 9 speaks to this sense of legal inadequacy, as both Archangeli and Bottinni have been seen largely as comic relief between the more serious narratives of Pompilia and the Pope (Buckler 187). In his translation of The Old Yellow Book, early twentieth-century judge John Marshall Gest takes issue with Browning's comedic portrayal of these lawyers. In part, Gest is responding to Charles Hodell's earlier translation of The Old Yellow Book, in which Hodell argued that the attorneys were “chiefly devoted to the establishing or refutation of certain points of law” and so “the truth of the tragedy and the real claims of justice are of little interest” to them (239). Feeling that his brothers in the legal profession are being unfairly attacked, Gest points out that it is not the lawyer's job to intertwine “human sympathy” with the execution of his duties because to do so would have wounded his standing before the court (48). In other words, “real claims of [human] justice” are not at issue in the case from a professional standpoint, but this is of course precisely the problem that Browning sees in the legal process. Because the process doesn't claim to pursue truth and justice in any ideal sense, the lawyers’ attention to legal maneuvering, skilled though they may be, misses the mark. So although the legal voices are a part of the poem's fabric of truth, they are shown to be more concerned with being remembered as good lawyers, a concern that does not necessarily include achieving justice.

Any consideration of Browning's approach to truth in the poem is fraught with difficulty, since the term is deployed in varied ways throughout the text. In the poem's opening book “truth” appears to refer primarily to evidentiary facts, whereas the poem's conclusion draws a distinction between truth as “fanciless fact” and truth as “fanciful fact” (Cundiff 41, 49). This apparent inconsistency is actually Browning's method of distinguishing his work of “truth” in the poem from the “truth” of the legal documents contained in The Old Yellow Book (Cundiff 49). The narrator in Book 1 describes The Old Yellow Book, as “A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact” (1.86), drawing a distinction between fact and truth. This distinction is important because with it Browning asserts that such fact as is contained within The Old Yellow Book has failed as a record of memory as expressed through testimony. In Memory, History, and Forgetting Paul Ricoeur argues that at its core, “memory is tied [to] an ambition, a claim – that of being faithful to the past” (21). Ricoeur later exposes what he calls a “crisis of testimony” in which historical criticism undermines “the trustworthiness of testimony” (180). While Browning's conception of memory aligns quite nicely with Ricoeur's, the poet's delineation of “fact” and “truth” suggests that he locates a crisis in the process of historical documentation that resulted in The Old Yellow Book rather than in testimony, and therefore his poetic work seeks to restore testimonial memory that has been obscured by history.

In pursuit of this restoration of testimonial memory, the ring metaphor that Browning introduces in the poem's opening allows him to claim that the poem arrives at a truth that is more faithful to the memory of the events recorded than the historical documents have provided.

Here Browning gives three criteria for judging whether any narrative has the “truth of force”: first, it must “preserve the memory.” Truth must have at its core a capacity to keep the memory of an event – preservation must maintain the thing itself in its original, unaltered state. So part of Browning's task in the opening book of the poem is to assess whether or not The Old Yellow Book has done this with respect to the truth of Guido's crime. The second criterion is that truth be “sufficient” and “self-sustaining.” How can a truth be self-sustaining? The answer is in the final criterion: Browning suggests that if the truth of The Old Yellow Book is a “truth of force” then if he were to destroy the original document, “the memory of Guido and his wife” would not be lost. The truth as memory must be immune to the destruction of its physical, textual record. Browning's point is well made; at the time of his discovery, the truth of The Old Yellow Book was neither self-sustaining nor immune to the destruction of the book itself, since the story had fallen into obscurity. In other words, the truth of force that preserves memory must exist both outside of text and outside of individual recollection. Browning's conclusion is that this type of sustained memory can only be effected by the imagination of the artist poet.

Browning argues that the imagination of the poet can slice through the fog of history and arrive at the truth of force; the poet's imagination alone can resurrect the memory and make it self-sustaining. Whatever effort was made in this regard at the time of the trial was insufficient:

All that remains is the debris of that granite pillar turned sandstone; the original has “dwindled into no bigger than a book” (1.671), making The Old Yellow Book the very result of this process of the degradation and loss of truth. Rigg reads this passage as suggesting that “the heart of the murder story survives” (42), but I would argue that Browning's metaphor is not nearly so encouraging as her analysis suggests. Indeed, the imagery is far more bleak, as the memory has dwindled from this great structure to this one, fragile book – the notion of an essential core or “heart” being maintained does not appear here. As the detritus of historical memory, Browning does not see in The Old Yellow Book a complete document to be understood and interpreted but the dilapidated remains of something greater that must be claimed through the application of imagination to the written memory. As such, The Old Yellow Book is both inadequate and indispensible for his project; without the original documents Browning has only fact-less fancy, so The Old Yellow Book must simultaneously be preserved and superseded by the poem's truth.

By linking the concept of truth to a self-sustaining memory, one which would be endangered by The Old Yellow Book's destruction, Browning conflates the textual legal testimony of his source material and memory. As he indicates, the Italian legal system of the seventeenth century was especially conducive to a poetic treatment of the original testimony; because witnesses in the Italian courts gave their testimony in writing, Browning describes them as having “only spoke in print” with “printed voice[s]” (1.166–67).Footnote ² It is perhaps surprising that Browning would choose such a collection of legal testimony as the basis for a series of dramatic monologues, since that poetic genre, with which Browning is most associated, often simulates vocal speech, with the character seeming to speak to a particular audience. Spoken courtroom testimony would seem to make a better subject for dramatic monologue, and yet The Ring and the Book manages to provide some of the most convincing “printed voices” of Browning's career. In producing this epic work, Browning essentially aims to restore the “pure crude fact” of the affidavit or legal pleading through an artistic representation of each document's origin as an unconstrained oral speech prior to its being denuded by history. As the poem's conclusion argues, “Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth” (12.843–44) since “our human speech is naught, / Our human testimony false” (12.838–39). Books 2 through 11 follow the pattern that I have described; the monologues serve as transcripts of each character's vocal speech, and it is these speeches that were later transformed into the documents contained within The Old Yellow Book. In this way, Browning anachronistically positions his work as prior to the written documentation on which it is based.Footnote ³

In essence, the poem becomes what Michel Foucault called the “oral correlative” – the speech that confirms and ultimately gives the power of truth to the written account (Foucault 39). While Foucault is primarily concerned with the nature of confession, a more expansive rendering of his concept is present in The Ring and the Book, for it is not just the accused who is offered the chance to speak, but all who have a part to play in this crime, including those who only interpret it, as in Books 2–4. As Foucault points out, the classic purpose of the confession was to be the “authentication . . . of the written preliminary investigation” (39). But Browning is not interested in simply providing corroboration of The Old Yellow Book; his source material is construed as the crumbling remains of a once grand structure. Foucault's term then is not precisely indicative of Browning's project, although it gestures in the right direction; a better approximation of Browning's work in the poem would be the restoration of the “oral spirit” of The Old Yellow Book. These speeches are the utterances that together take the dusty detritus of The Old Yellow Book and breathe the truth of force back into its pages. However, in pursuing this project of repristination, Browning does not give obvious preference to one reading or interpretation of the evidence. While the legal system, as Foucault indicates, would use the oral correlative as a method of reifying its decision, Browning creates in the poem an oral spirit for The Old Yellow Book that is at once indebted to its source material while also resisting the possibility of a single preferred reading of its contents.

II. Truth in the Law's Failure

Of course, The Ring and the Book does contain the accused's speech prior to execution, the very speech act that would function as the oral correlative. Yet Guido's monologue in Book 11 has none of the hallmarks associated with the final confession of the condemned, because in it Guido does nothing to confirm the truth as established by the courts. While confirming that he killed Pompilia and her parents, he does not confess in the sense of admitting his actions as wrong and repenting from them; indeed this final speech is an accusation. Guido vehemently decries the nature of the justice he has received and seeks to undermine the authority of those who have played a part in the process that has led to his condemnation.

However, as Richard Altick and James Loucks argue, Book 11 can be seen as an authentication of the legal and papal decisions, because Guido reveals “his true bestial self” (69). Altick and Loucks's reading of this book is telling in that they conclude that the “‘truth’ revealed is not so much in the words themselves as in what they tell of the speaker” (74). Unfortunately, such a reading encourages us to dismiss the content of Guido's speech in order to confirm him as nothing more than the villainous murderer. As William Buckler points out, we must recognize that “Guido makes some cogent arguments that are not made false by his personal falseness” (259). Despite Guido's murder of Pompilia and her parents, his final speech reveals a man desperately trying to maintain a memory of himself that has been undone by his conviction and impending execution. As such, Guido's monologue works to counter the authority of the courts, raising piercing questions about the nature of testimony, memory, and law in the process. His criticism of the legal system's inconsistency echoes Browning's suspicions about the authenticity of his source material. I will examine Guido's critique of the law in his final speech, in order to show first that Guido contributes to the holistic truth of the entire poem and second that he offers several reasonable arguments that undermine the legal system's claims to authority. In this way, Browning's Guido is not simply a man revealing his madness or evil, but a key component in the poem's demonstration that Art is far superior to the Law in generating a self-sustaining truth that preserves memory.

In his final speech, Guido is visited by two clerics, who have come to hear his final confession before he is executed. Guido loses no time in questioning the need for his confession from a legal standpoint. He demands to know “If Law sufficed would you come here, entreat / I supplement law, and confess forsooth? / Did not the Trial show things plain enough?” (11.509–11). Guido's question is rhetorical insofar as the obvious implication here is that the trial was not able to “show things plain enough.” By consistently claiming that he has been wronged by a legal system that had previously allowed for the killing of promiscuous wives, Guido destabilizes its authority to execute him. Unlike the confession of a prisoner who admits his crime and accepts punishment, Guido's speech will not deign to provide approbation for the system that has led him to this position. The confessed criminal removes any grain of doubt as to the justice of the execution, but the defiant criminal not only refuses to remove that grain, he might even increase uncertainty as to whether the execution is just.

Guido's explanation of how his expectations of the legal system have been controverted forms a key component in which Browning underscores the fallibility of legal authority. In principle, it is not unreasonable for Guido to expect that the legal system should have clearly defined standards that are recognized by all those under its power. He also expects, as Stanley Fish has described of the Common Law system, that precedent should play a role as “the process by which the past gets produced by the present so that it can then be cited as the producer of the present” (Fish 514).Footnote ⁴ In other words, one should be able to conclude that whatever legal action was taken for a certain behavior in the past would continue to be taken in the present. In Guido's opinion, the legal system has failed to behave in this way; having not himself been informed of the law's shift, Guido sardonically realizes that he will be “a warning, as I writhe / To all and each my fellows of the file, / And make law plain henceforward past mistake” (11.117–19). Thus, while Guido's crime is terrible, his complaint about a legal system that does not operate with a certain mechanistic reliability has merit.

In The Poetry of Experience (1957), Robert Langbaum claims that “law [in the poem] is too mechanical to deal adequately with moral issues” (118), and yet Guido's very criticism of the legal system in his final speech is that it all too often fails to follow its own mechanistic guidelines. Though a macabre moment, Guido's decision to commit murder hinges on this realization:

Guido draws the contrast between de facto and de jure claims with respect to what is allowable under the law. While the letter of the law (de jure) prohibits murder, history has shown that in actuality (de facto) husbands who kill adulterous wives are not sentenced to death. So while the legal system may resemble a mechanistic contract, its implementation is far more nuanced, allowing certain acts to pass without the severest punishment.

Browning deftly ties Guido's destabilization of the legal mechanism into the very method of his death, suggesting that the capacity of the legal machinery is subordinate to that of the artist. The mannaia, or guillotine, is the new “engine” by which Guido will experience the finality of the legal mechanism; it represents the rapidity with which Guido's legal expectations were overturned. While previous experience had suggested that the act would be overlooked or lightly prosecuted, Guido now finds that the legal machinery has moved quite swiftly to condemn him to death at the very moment when he expected to be punished but left alive. After cataloguing several ways he might die if allowed to live (old age, stroke), Guido compares the inhuman guillotine to the hand of a professional.

Browning suggests, through Guido's comparison of the guillotine to Art, that the machine is inadequate to the job that a single professional human being could perform. Alluding to Louis XIV's physician, Fagon, Guido expresses his belief that a surgeon's severing of his spinal cord would be less painful than the allegedly painless guillotine. In other words, the new “engine” removes the human from the moment of execution, whereas an artistic approach would require the dexterity and precision of a master surgeon. Therefore, Browning is using Guido's speech to further support the importance of the poem to the historical moment of Guido's death. Browning's writing becomes a (re)enactment of Guido's execution, and thus a more humane death than that which was afforded to him by the guillotine. Browning dons the black mask and executes Guido poetically by enacting the memory of Guido's death for the reader of the poem; as such, Browning becomes the kind of executioner that Guido claims he would prefer. By devoting the longest monologue in the poem to Guido, Browning allows Guido a measure of control over how he is remembered, the very kind of control that The Old Yellow Book, in Browning's characterization, removes.

Throughout the critique of the legal system in his final monologue, Guido is endeavoring to unveil the institutional weaknesses of those powers that have decided to execute him. Browning has his villain expose weaknesses in the social institutions that are charged with arriving at justice; his critiques work toward the goal of undermining the authority of his death sentence.Footnote ⁵ Guido's monologue then posits the possibility that it is unjust for a legal system to exert its power to end the life of one whose memory and testimony present an alternative to its own master narrative. By rejecting Guido's perspective of the case entirely, the legal system rejects the truth of his memories of what occurred.

III. Memory Exposed and Concealed

Seeing that his memories and perspective have been ignored, Guido in his final monologue engages what Yale theologian Miroslav Volf calls “masochistic memory” (11).Footnote ⁶ In this form of memory, Guido recalls those institutional practices that anger him, but there are dangers associated with Guido's continuing exposure of the past. Volf's description of the way memory functions for the victim of wrongdoing is also an apt description of Guido's experience: “Memory metastasizes into the territory of the future, and the future, drained of new possibilities, mutates into an extension of the painful past” (81). Guido's future is obviously drained of possibilities in that he is soon to be executed, but even in his pleas for clemency he focuses on the failings of the authorities that have convicted him. His primary concern is to expose the faults of others.

The difficulty is that memory does not function solely as an exposing force. In order for The Ring and the Book to offer a self-sustaining memory of the case, Browning demonstrates, through Pompilia's narrative, that memory can conceal and be concealed and still contribute to the memorial sustenance of the whole. Like Guido, Pompilia is facing her death; in fact, Books 7 and 11 are the only monologues of characters who are facing their deaths and have firsthand knowledge of the case (the other near-death monologue is delivered by the Pope). Just as Browning hopes to replace The Old Yellow Book with The Ring and the Book, Pompilia counters Guido's masochistic memory by concealing what happened to her on the night of the attack.

Criticism on The Ring and the Book has generally agreed that Browning sympathizes with and accepts Pompilia's testimony. The Pope's statement that Pompilia is “Perfect in whiteness” appears to align with Browning's position (10.1006). And yet Browning's statements in Book 12, calling into question the truthfulness of human testimony, suggest that even Pompilia's testimony must be viewed with an eye of skepticism.Footnote ⁷ Through such skepticism, the harmonies between Pompilia's concealing memory and Guido's revealing memory become clear, strengthening the poem's holistic truth. Such a harmonization of testimony and memory is absolutely essential to Browning's project because a holistic truth poetically rendered will inevitably have internal contradictions. Just as Guido's narrative offers us more than a murderer's revelation of his evil, we must also recognize that Pompilia's narrative invites our skepticism and highlights Pompilia's skill at crafting her testimony.

Unfortunately, readings of Pompilia have tended to fall into one of two camps. The first was popularly voiced by Thomas Carlyle when he “summarily dismissed the whole endeavor” because, as Carlyle said at the time, “The real story is plain enough in looking into it; the girl and the handsome young priest were lovers” (qtd. in Brady 22). Here we have skepticism of Pompilia that slips into complete dismissal. Ann Brady argues that such a reading is based on a suspicion that “Browning could not have created these people as they actually were,” which leads to “sexual skepticism” and incredulity towards Pompilia's testimony (Brady 23). However, we must not overcorrect for Carlyle's error by immediately accepting Pompilia's testimony unexamined. That would be, in effect, to reenact the very nature of the trial within the criticism of the work itself; skepticism and discernment would be deployed to favor one side over another. However, while Browning has not written in Pompilia's narrative the veiled pleadings for sympathy from a promiscuous young woman, neither has he presented us with an unadorned and innocent narrative from an unassuming victim. Pompilia's narrative indicates that she is keenly aware of the power that she wields with her testimony, and as such Browning invites his readers to understand that innocence is not merely the absence of guilt, but the creation and sustenance of a particular narrative genre – the victim's testimony. In this way Browning develops Pompilia into a character who is both sexually pure and skilled in crafting a narrative that is calculating and compelling.

In the closing book of the poem, Browning offers a description of the relationship between the historical testimony and memory that is also an apt representation of Pompilia's testimony:

Memory here is conceived of as an ephemeral faculty, incapable of grasping and retaining the full “brightness” of testimony as time passes. The solution to this problem lies, according to Browning's final lines, in the poem itself: “Art may tell a truth / Obliquely” (12.859–60). In this way Browning describes not only his own project in the poem as a whole but also that of Pompilia's particular testimony. Art can serve to reignite the brightness of memory through its oblique truth-telling, and this is precisely how Pompilia approaches her witnessing. The notion of an oblique truth is realized in the concealing memory that Pompilia enacts through her narrative. Browning's metaphor of light is particularly apropos, because as the poem progresses it is clear that Pompilia's testimony has outshone that of the other witnesses. In figuring Pompilia as an artist-witness, Browning makes her a ring-maker like himself.

Pompilia's oblique approach to truth is demonstrated in her concealment of Guido's attack. Nowhere in her monologue does she illuminate or describe what happened after her mother opened the door of her home to Guido and his accomplices. Indeed, several times her narrative appears to be heading in that direction, but each time she stops short of giving a full account. Describing that fateful day, Pompilia explains that her father went out sightseeing, returned and described the Christmas decorations, “when, at the door, / A tap: we started up: you know the rest” (7.266–67). The great irony of this is that, of course, we don't know the rest; she is the only surviving victim of the attack. Pompilia can asymptoticallyFootnote ⁸ approach the crime only as far as Guido's knock; her memory is unable to cross that fateful threshold, leaving the actual commission of the crime on the other side of her parents’ front door.

By never fully describing the crime, Browning's Pompilia testifies in a way that would be psychologically consistent with a victim of trauma. Her resistance to recalling the terrible violence she witnessed is entirely understandable. Pompilia acknowledges her “twenty-two dagger-wounds” early in her monologue, but only insofar as they relate to “the surgeon [who] cared for me, / To count my wounds” (7.37–38). In other words, this report of her injuries is not her own testimony, but a repetition of what her doctors have reported to her. Otherwise, she is silent on the attack. Slavoj Žižek adopts a similarly oblique and veiled approach in his book Violence (2008):

To an extent the character of Pompilia structures her monologue in precisely this way, as a “lure” that “prevents” or at least discourages reading askance. The irony is that while the character speaking the monologue attempts concealment, the author writing the monologue introduces inconsistences that lead us to resist, on some level, complete empathy with Pompilia.

Through Pompilia's narrative inconsistencies, Browning suggests that she is crafting her story in order to sanctify her identity in the memories of those who hear her testimony. Of course, returning to Žižek's ideas, we should not expect the victim of a violent crime to provide a particularly consistent narrative in the first place:

Žižek's account of a victim's memory of trauma extends to Pompilia's narrative. If she were to present her narrative in a fashion similar to that of the lawyers, it would raise a certain suspicion. However, the narrative inconsistencies that are created by her concealing of memory are more than just gaps due to trauma. Through the process of telling her story, Browning shows that Pompilia cloaks her testimony and identity in the image of the Virgin Mary.

Throughout The Ring and the Book the paternity of Pompilia's newborn son, Gaetano, is questioned, but Pompilia's concealing memory allows her to claim that “No father that he ever knew at all, / Nor ever had – no, never had, I say! / That is the truth” (7.91–93). If Pompilia's claim that she did not commit adultery is true, then Guido must be the father of the child. Pompilia admits that she resisted, without success, Guido's sexual advances and that she knew she was pregnant before leaving with Caponsacchi (7.787, 1222ff). Her testimony systematically draws upon Guido's concealed violence, obviates Guido's very existence by this act, and subsequently leaves Gaetano fatherless, sealing Pompilia's virginal position by making Gaetano's conception immaculate.

Browning uses Judeo-Christian vocabulary to frame Pompilia's concealment of Guido's attack; rather than remember what has happened, Pompilia notes about halfway through her narrative that “more days, more deeds must I forget” (7.1190), as if to speak is to be “purged of the past, the foul in me, washed fair” (7.352). By promising to forget, Pompilia puts herself in the place of one forgiving a great wrong. As in the Christian doctrine of Atonement, whereby Christ removes (forgets) the sins of his people and is reconciled with them, Browning crafts Pompilia's narrative such that atonement is (r)enacted through Guido's violent attack. Referring to her body, Pompilia claims that “Whatever he touched is rightly ruined: plague / It caught, and disinfection it had craved / Still but for Guido; I am saved through him / So as by fire” (7.1736–39). Guido's attack is interpreted here as literally “saving” Pompilia by purifying her defiled body – the taint of his sexual penetration is removed by his sanguinary penetration.

Through this purification, Pompilia restores her virginity by expunging Guido's sexual abuse. Gaetano is now, by Pompilia's argument, more than just a child without a father, he is a child for whom there is no father. The infant Gaetano then becomes “God's way of breaking the good news to flesh” (7.625), in a direct reference to the “gospel” (the word gospel being derived from “good news” in Old English) of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, Browning's Pompilia plays expertly on the fact that Guido's attack happened during the Christmas season to further deify Gaetano.

Here the metaphor clearly takes precedent over narrative consistency, as Pompilia has already testified that Gaetano had been left with a nursemaid and was not in the house. As she describes her feelings as a mother, the celebration of Christ slips into a celebration of Gaetano – the “He” in line 1691 has a certain ambiguity that allows it to be read as both a reference to Christ and to Gaetano simultaneously. As a virgin mother, Pompilia solidifies her claim to Mary's identity:

Being born of “love,” brings Guiseppe (Joseph) Caponsacchi into view as Gaetano's loving “father.” Caponsacchi completes Pompilia's construction of herself as the Virgin Mother, figured as the husband and father who loves without sexual intercourse. In assuming this identity, Pompilia counterbalances her husband's memories of exposure and underscores that “active forgetting [is] part of remembering itself” (Volf 195). Browning draws on both types of memory in order to arrive at the poem's “truth of force.”

IV. Holistic Truth

The relationship between Pompilia's concealed memory and her appropriation of Marian identity works with Guido's narrative to define the kind of holistic truth at which the legal system cannot arrive. Pompilia describes the time from the moment of her wedding to Guido as “one blank / Over and ended; a terrific dream. / It is the good of dreams – so soon they go!” (7.584–86), and yet her confessor urges her to “‘remember more! / . . . I need the cruelty exposed, explained, / Or how can I advise you to forgive?’ / He thought I could not properly forgive / Unless I ceased forgetting” (7.627, 629–32). Pompilia's narrative resists both of the requests that Don Celestino makes of her: to confess and to forgive. As I have argued, her conception of Guido has eliminated his acts, which, having never occurred, are then not forgiven, and her own identity as the unblemished Virgin Mary requires no confession. Through her “forgetting” she evades both confession and forgiveness. Guido's narrative similarly resists the call of the priests to confess his crimes and admit that his execution is just; by using memory to expose the faults of the very system that seeks his confession, Guido's final cry (“Pompilia, will you let them murder me?” [11.2427]) is a reflection of his entire monologue, a refutation of execution by naming it murder.

The characters within The Ring and the Book are clearly concerned with the religious implications of the case as much they are with its legal implications, and yet the poem suggests that the holistic truth is not about God but about human relationships. J. Hillis Miller argues that the “aesthetic moral of the poem is: ‘By multiplying points of view on the same event, you may transcend point of view, and reach at last God's own infinite perspective’” (149). Yet, the testimonial memories of Guido and Pompilia alone prove to be far more complicated than would allow for a transcendent divine truth. Indeed, because human testimony draws from human memory, “our human speech is naught, / Our human testimony false, our fame / And human estimation words and wind” (12.838–40). Volf's theological work on memory comes to a similar conclusion about memory's relationship to the human:

The paradox of being human is that one's memory always seems to be the truth – to both Guido and Pompilia the truth is what they tell us. Readers are no better equipped to judge the truth of the matter, as our memories and perspectives also constrain our understanding. Browning argues that human discourse is fraught with the possibility that truth “when it reaches [us], looks false, / Seems to be just the thing it would supplant” (12.854–55). Because our identities are refracted through memory, so too will our testimony be fractured, dispersed, and discontinuous.

The holistic truth that Art provides, then, is one that allows us to experience all perspectives without the requirement that we judge who is true and who is false. Because Browning construes Art as a form of discourse “wherein man nowise speaks to men,” it stands outside of the inevitable failings in human discourse (12.858). This is key to Browning's claim that the poem is more true than The Old Yellow Book, which is not Art, and therefore susceptible to all the failings of discourse. The artistic treatment of its contents not only reconstructs the sandstone pillar of which The Old Yellow Book is the only remaining fragment, it makes in The Ring and the Book a more ideal pillar than could have existed before. The poem then becomes a part of the paradox that it displays so effectively: as the work of human hands it strives towards a unity that will communicate the fractures in human discourse that stem from our own memories. Finally, the poem obtains its “truth of force” in the memories of its readers; rather than discarding or favoring one side, by reading and remembering the poem, Browning's readers carry the holistic truth of this Roman murder case, providing the very sustenance that The Old Yellow Book was unable to effect.